Son[i]a
Anthea Caddy is a Tasmanian-born and now Berlin-based experimental cellist and sound artist who explores projected sound energy through spatial practices that highlight acoustic and physical phenomena. In this podcast, Anthea walks us through her journey from playing cello in rock bands as a teenager to her ongoing research into projected sound energy. She explains her long-term research on directional speakers and the results of the iterations and testing of the parabolic speakers. She also talks about documentation and about the difficulties of approaching large-scale sound performance.
Marc Larré works with video, photography, sculpture and objects, giving free rein to a dilettante practice that entails attentive listening to the materials he handles, and also to the context—to his surroundings. In his thinking-by-doing, Marc generates countless unexpected connections between temporary situations, objects, and people, in order to question notions of progress and modernity. In this podcast, we talk to Marc Larré about megaliths, stones, and anti-monuments. As we listen, artisanal practices, traces, frictions, clay, and plaster make an appearance. We talk about the experiential dimension of his practice and about the connections and synergies with the art community in Barcelona. And naturally, we also talk about art, about precarity, and about the need to rethink our working conditions, together.
Antye Greie (aka AGF or poemproducer) is a poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor, and curator, born in East Germany and based on the island of Hailuoto in northern Finland for over fifteen years. In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls “feminist sonic technologies”.
Dani Admiss is an independent curator, researcher and educator who spent part of her childhood in Dubai before emigrating to the UK and settling in Edinburgh. Her projects are situated at the intersection of art, design, technology and cultural practice and—in a constant search for a sense of belonging—explore infrastructures and relationality. "Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline" emerged in response to the simple and complex question: “How can I be useful?” The answer—by creating a decarbonisation plan for the gallery—gradually took the form of a conversation of many voices, involving various communities in an exercise in social justice and collective learning to rethink the processes of the art world in times of climate emergency.
Con una trayectoria de varias décadas de prácticas e intercambios entre pecho y espalda, Maria José Arjona explora a través de la performace de larga duración un cuerpo que pendula al borde del abismo de manera afirmativa. Su repertorio de gestos hace parte de un gran archivo en permanente tránsito y transformación, a menudo atravesado por la historia de la performance, aunque siempre vivo. En este podcast, Maria José Arjona mira hacia adelante y hacia atrás, para trazar un diagrama invisible de procesos, acciones y deseos, entre su hacer en solitario y su necesidad de desbordar una política del tiempo con otros artistas, mediante la subversión del tiempo institucional: ¿qué le pasa a la performance y al performer cuando su trabajo pasa por estar ocho horas en un museo?
Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where these protocols and art intersect. Far from the naive triumphalism of Web3 evangelists, his approach focuses on the artists and projects that actually try to integrate some of the salient features and affordances of distributed, trustless ledgers into their practice. In this podcast, we talk to Martin Zeilinger about the poetic and political potential of the blockchain, while at the same time tracing a somewhat fuzzy timeline that connects 1960s conceptual art to smart contracts, decentralised autonomous organisations and a host of consensus mechanisms.
Chilean artist Nicole L'Huillier formulates an antidisciplinary practice that takes up a position on boundaries, generating a liminal and sensorial space in which categories such as architecture, science, music and sound tend to break down and intertwine. Thinking with “surlogics”—the logic of her native south— Nicole defends the need to use multiple kinds of thinking at the same time, and embraces mestizaje, as a way of being and existing that is rich and full of complexity and contradictions. In this podcast, we open up Nicole L'Huillier’s processes, methodologies, and rituals, in conversation with old friends—Gloria Anzaldúa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gabriela Mistral, AM Kanngiesser—and strangers. Their membrane-words caress and jolt us. Sounds, vibrations, resonance, structures, and other multiple sensorial transductions invite us to think up, amidst murmuring, other collective ways of being and incarnations.
Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.
In this podcast, we talk to philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”.
In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.